Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday October 09, 2010 @05:28PM
from the just-having-a-bit-of-fun-yer-honor dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Autonomous cars are years from mass production, but technologists who have long dreamed of them believe that they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has. Now the NY Times reports that Google has been working in secret on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver. With someone behind the wheel to take control if something went awry and a technician in the passenger seat to monitor the navigation system, seven test cars have driven 1,000 miles without human intervention and more than 140,000 miles with only occasional human control. One even drove itself down Lombard Street in San Francisco, one of the steepest and curviest streets in the nation. The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light."Update: 10/09 22:37 GMT by T: Reader harrymcc points out that the dream of self-driving cars is nothing new: "Both Popular Science and Popular Mechanics have regularly reported on such experiments; I rounded up some examples dating as far back as 1933."

You know, I think they are pulling a trick on us. My money is on the fact that they are actually outsourcing the drivers to India. There's no computer, just drone car drivers in Mumbai, web cams, and a really fast internet connection. This could also explain why traffic patterns in SF and Mumbai are almost identical.

And, who cares, if it can't fly, and I can't hop from my car to my 34th floor office using my jetpack, I don't want it.

Urmson (PhD, faculty on leave), Montemerlo (PhD), and Thrun (former faculty) all have ties to Carnegie Mellon. Autonomous driving has been a steady effort at CMU. For example, No Hands Across America [cmu.edu] was in 1995.

I read TFS and the first thing I thought was that mimicking human decisions is a silly idea. It's probably just the summary, not what they're actually doing. i do see some value in the AI determining likely reactions of other drivers though.

Except where state laws also prohibit driving in such a way as to cause a wreck, deliberately. Even if your vehicle is not involved in the impact, if your driving can be shown to have contributed to a wreck in which someone died, you can be charged with murder.

Except where state laws also prohibit driving in such a way as to cause a wreck, deliberately. Even if your vehicle is not involved in the impact, if your driving can be shown to have contributed to a wreck in which someone died, you can be charged with murder.

If you're driving like a dick and cause an accident then it makes sense to charge you, whatever your position relative to the impact. It's entirely possible to be at fault even if your car is not actually in the crash, e.g., if you're switching lanes across a freeway in a crazy way in heavy traffic that causes others to stamp on their brakes.

One of the problems I have seen is a little bit more confusing then a car backing into another car.

Suppose you were driving down the freeway and you were maintaining a good assured clear distance from the vehicle in front of you. Your in the right hand lane doing the speed limit, or perhaps the middle lane and faster traffic is moving around you in the left lanes like they are supposed to even though they are statutorily speeding. Now someone else in a big hurry who was texting their friend about being late for cocktails, changes lanes in front of you and erases that assured clear distance. So being a good driver, you decrease your speed to provide the proper distance again, then all the sudden, the driver in front of you looks away from their phone and notices they need to take the exist you are about to pass and slams on the brakes causing you to hit them. Now suppose all this happened within about 3 seconds or so time so there was no safe way for you to react any differently that could have avoided the accident.

I bring this up because the rear driver isn't always at fault by their own actions per se. I've seen that happen many times before on different highways all across the country. A lot of times, it happens to big rigs which also generally ends in major injuries and a highway that's locked up for hours.

I otherwise agree with you. But there are times when the acts of others remove the ability for responsible driving to exist for a short period of time. It's those times in which blaming the person behind you is really attacking the wrong person.

Deciding to live over 35 miles from your workplace is a pretty fucking stupid decision to have made.

That's a pretty fucking arrogant position to take. It's not like jobs fall off of trees, not in the U.S., not in the twenty-first century. Sometimes people have to do what they have to do, especially if they have a family depending upon them. If you happen to live a half a block from work and don't even need to own a car, you know what? I'm happy for you. But, if you should happen to lose that job, and maybe have a number of financial obligations you have to meet, well, I'll bet you'll get a fucking car and start commuting faster than I can say, "you're a dick."

I actually live in a nicer section in a metropolitan area. Now, the rent I pay is not awful and it is not great. However, if you live outside of the city there are several additional expenses that have to be calculated. Vehicle, insurance, fuel and parking will quickly tear away at the reduced costs of living outside of the city. In fact, with my "more expensive" living conditions I actually live quite a bit cheaper then my commuter counter-parts.

There are some various pros and cons to living in or outside of the city, but these have to be weighed by the individual and/or family. For instance, it is quite a bit less to own a home in suburbia and these areas I would consider more youth friendly. Now, in downtown the nightlife is waaaay better. In fact, it's about that time.

The only people who think like this seem to be without any sort of corporeal responsibility. Their only perceived responsibilities are to themselves - their self-satisfaction.

They don't drive, because a car is a liability and a cost. Easier to mooch off of others.

They don't have families, because they're too immature and/or irresponsible to realize the benefit such things provide to society.

They don't own homes, because a mortgage (and the associated payments) demand stability and willpower to resist compulsive urges.

They're able to pay for small, single-person (or shared) apartments near their place of work because of the aforementioned lack of constraints. It's pretty easy to pay 1800/month for a loft apartment when it's just you living there and you haven't much more than a bottle of Jack Daniels and a pile of $300 shirts.

A person who doesn't want a family is immature or irresponsible? I mean really? You know what I find to be irresponsible? Some notion that a person needs to get married and have children because some lunatic on the Internet says there is a societal benefit to it. I'm sure those kids will grow up in a fantastic loving home what with their parents wishing they were in any situation other than that one. It seems like a fantastic environment to raise kids.

Not owning a home is a result of lacking willpower against compulsion? How about the possibility that they find owning some big house on some big lot to be a wasteful use of resources (and I'm not talking about their money). How about them feeling that they don't need 3000 square feet of space to knock around in on their own, since they have yet to get married and have children to please you?

Maybe they mooch off of people with cars; unlike you, I'm not stupid enough to pant entire categories of people with the same brush. But there's also the possibility that they simply take public transportation or walk places. Tasks which benefit them monetarily and in terms of their own health, benefit society by not contributing unnecessary pollution to the air or crowding to the streets and even benefit businesses by not making parking some huge requirement and by freeing up more money for them to spend on loft apartments and $300 shirts. But I'm sure to you they're just being unfair to all the used car salesman and mechanics and gas station owners out there by not paying their fair share into those peoples' wallets. Those irresponsible kids.

In short? I can tell you're not young by your user ID, but I see you still haven't managed to grow up either. Your idea of a perfect way to live your life is not everybody's idea, nor does it mean it is the right idea just because you happen to be the one who possesses it. So do us all a favor and shut the fuck up. Go about your business your way and everybody else will go about their business their way. Nobody needs your smug sense of superiority, least of all you.

I have to say that I like the idea of a car driving itself. In theory it should be able to be better than any human. However, software is what I do for a living and it seems there are always circumstances that can not be predicted if software but would be easy for a human to handle. It's those situations that I would be paranoid about if the car was driving itself. The problem would be that even if the human could intervene there is no guarantee that you could intervene fast enough or if the system woul

Considering that virtually all crashes that involve vehicles are the result of human error and are in predictable situations, I think that it's probably safer in the long term to have computers do all the driving with just an emergency override.

Or even more or less remove the override in favor of a single "push this if you're about to drive off a cliff" button.

Depends on the driver, it's certainly true for most drivers but not all of them. Of course most drivers also overestimate their driving abilities.

There is no way current technology can make this work. Consider how many things could be coming at your car from the periphery that the system would not be able to detect. Animals running across the road, snow and mud slides, road alligators being flipped up from the car in front of you, etc. There is no way a computer could accurately detect these things comi

There is no way current technology can make this work. Consider how many things could be coming at your car from the periphery that the system would not be able to detect. Animals running across the road, snow and mud slides, road alligators being flipped up from the car in front of you, etc.

Consider how many things could be coming at your car from the periphery that the human eye would not be able to detect. Computer systems can have more sensors with longer range.
Computers can track more objects coming from more directions than the human eye can track simultaneously.

There is no way a computer could accurately detect these things coming from a far distance on an intercept course with you.

Of course they could. It's just a matter of having the right (expensive) sensors on board with sufficient range.

There are even types of sensors such as radar that can detect objects a much larger distance, and infrared sensors that can detect objects (such as children) much smaller than the human eye can, or objects such as child pedestrians that are obscured by a parked car.

The computer can track and predict the object that would not even be visible to your eye, and anticipate the child outside your field of vision about to try and run across the street in front of you.

The human eye is a pretty good, versatile sensor, with a wide range of things it can pick up, but it has limited range (especially if the driver is nearsighted and only has the minimal 20/40 vision required to get their license), and you only have two of them.

For example... you can look to the front, to the side, or behind you, but not in both places at the same time.

This matters, for example, if you are changing lanes.

You can look behind you and to your side to verify clearance, meanwhile, while you glanced behind you for that second, a car in front of you has slammed on their breaks, or a vehicle turning onto the highway has turned in front of you or changed lanes in front of you within 50 feet, and the time you have to make a decision and react was drastically reduced.

I have to say that I like the idea of a car driving itself. In theory it should be able to be better than any human. However, software is what I do for a living and it seems there are always circumstances that can not be predicted if software but would be easy for a human to handle.

The part of me that is a programmer agrees with you. The part of me that is a driver and a road cyclist must concede that the bar has been set ridiculously low for the car AI to drive better than the average human.

The composition of the driving logic is the most important part. It can't be a big switch case. It has to be a bunch of interconnecting heuristics, constantly looking for every sign of trouble, being able to figure out context and priority of every such signal and also failing gracefully.

There are also tough tradeoffs: It's obvious that if someone's running out in front of the car, you can't go even if the light just turned green, but if a small animal ran out in front of the car, you're doing 110 km/h, every lane is packed and you're on a bridge, you're probably best off actually continuing. It becomes an equation with a thousand terms, solved continuously.

It'd be awesome not to need a DD (or risk a DUI) to go to the bar in the many US cities with no or inadequate public transit... though I bet the MADD assholes will lobby to make it still illegal, somehow, and probably try to force a breathalyzer to turn the damn auto-drive on in the first place.

MADD are assholes because they don't actually care about stopping drunk driving anymore. They care about stopping drinking. As stated by their disillusioned founder Candy Lightner, they've become neo-prohibitionists.

Not everyone can afford to blow $80+ just to get to and from their night out. I practically never go out for that reason, and because I know being a DD sucks and wouldn't impose on someone like that. I go to a bar maybe a couple times a year, but I'd be far more inclined to accompany other friends who go more frequently if the transportation weren't an issue.

As for MADD, they have a history of pursuing policy that has more to do with neo-Prohibition than keeping people safe. I don't dislike them because they're against drunk driving--hooray for that, in fact--but because they appear to be anti-alcohol. My comment about them trying to find some way to make this technology not a legal option for inebriated transportation was serious; I bet they would.

Not everyone can afford to blow $80+ just to get to and from their night out.

Question: Why does a cab cost $80?Answer: The driver.

If you have cars which can drive themselves. No driver required. Therefore, much cheaper cabs.

You only have business running costs, repairs, fuel. no driver.

ok. so you've just blown $50k on a new personal autonomous car. What are you going to do with it? Put it in the garage all day while you work? It cost 50k, you bought it on credit, you are paying for finance. Its autonomous, it can drive itself it doesn't need to sit in a garage all day. It can carry passengers while you are at work and pay for itself.

So there you have it. When the autonomous car arrives, it'll end up as a taxi cab. It'll put the existing cabbies out of business, and the concept of personally owning a car will also go out of the window (This will also kill the mass market for cars entirely). Why spend 50k on a personal autonomous car at all? Cabs are now cheap and will pick you up at the door.

I am not alone in enjoying my own private personalized micro-environment while being transported

Unfortunately, I think you'll find yourself replaced by someone cheaper who pays $3 per day to be driven to and from work using an autonomous cab vs your 50k capital expense and ongoing finance servicing.

Existing mass transit is group based and suffers some significant disadvantages vs cars and so people who make use of public transport today; cabs, buses, trains, also suffer those disadvantages. With autonomous cabs, those disadvantages go away.

Cabs are also not economical in many suburban or rural areas as the fuel cost is amortized among too few clients (with possibly many miles of empty transportation between them).

I like to drink. I like to drive. It's really stupid to combine the two, so I do my driving early (to the beer store!) and get it out of the way, and when I get home, it's then that I fire up the grill and have a drink.

I oppose drunk driving. I oppose MADD. My two positions are consistent. Are yours?

I like to drink. I like to drive. It's really stupid to combine the two, so I do my driving early (to the beer store!) and get it out of the way, and when I get home, it's then that I fire up the grill and have a drink.

I oppose drunk driving. I oppose MADD. My two positions are consistent. Are yours?

I was going to reply to the GP but you said it pretty well. I think some people need a roomful of noisy, drunken strangers screaming at sports on a big-screen TV to enjoy a few drinks. Never really understood that, myself.

I also agree with you about MADD. They've gone completely around the bend, off the deep end, into a bizarre, and completely untenable Prohibitionist position.

I don't go to bars to drink, I go to bars to socialize and chase women -- it gets lonely living by yourself. But if you're in a bar, you drink.

Happily, you can hardly throw a beer bottle in this town without hitting a tavern, so driving to a tavern here is insane. Well, driving home from a tavern -- lots of Saturday mornings I walk to the bar to retrieve my car.

This doesn't have anything to do with driving. It has to do with being convicted, and going to jail, without being able to mount a defense.

It also has to do with the State using highly suspect technology in order to file that DUI in the first place. The Breathalyzer should never, ever have been accepted by the government for that purpose: too many lives have been destroyed by defective, poorly-maintained, badly-designed and improperly used equipment. The same thing applies to police radar, but the difference there is that a speeding ticket is nowhere near as devastating as a drunk-while-under-the-influence.

The State sees the things as an easy way out, and is willing to tolerate a certain number of false positives (more properly termed "collateral damage" because people can be badly hurt by a false accusation.) I don't drink and drive, but I would refuse a breathalyzer test: if the cop wants to take me to a local hospital and have them give me a blood test (with a sufficient quantity of blood drawn and stored such that my defense attorney could have the test reperformed if necessary) at the State's expense, well, that would be okay. But they don't want that: they want a simple go/no-go test that effectively convicts you, and it's very hard to argue with the results in court. That's because a machine is generally considered more trustworthy and more reliable than any human being. The fact that it may or may not be even remotely accurate is much less relevant to the legal system that it should be.

There was a case a few years ago, where a man accused of a DUI got the court to force the manufacturer of the Breathalyzer unit in question to turn over the embedded controller's source code for independent review. It was apparently so badly written that not only did the man get off, but all the cases where that model was used had to be readjudicated or otherwise reviewed. Ohio, I think, but I'm too tired to look it up. I hope that outfit lost every government contract it had, and they should probably have been made to pay the legal costs of all the people their gadget fucked over.

I've been a software developer for thirty years, and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow the legal system to use someone else's drain-bamaged firmware to convict me of something I did not do. Hell, I hate the fact that cars are so totally dependent upon embedded systems nowadays: makes me more nervous the more lines of code they add.

In PA, it's constitutional for a game warden to search your car without a warrant - in case you have been poaching..

No, it's considered legal under that State's laws, and is in fact probably unConstitutional. The problem is, the only way that law would ever be struck down on Constitutional grounds is if someone gets pissed off enough to take it to court. Most Constitutional violations in modern government (and there are many, that document is the Supreme Law of our Land but it has less and less force of law every day) remain indefinitely because nobody is willing or able to challenge them. Law enforcement searching your

The offenses for drink-related offenses are often far too lenient. But the laws deciding what counts as a drink-related offense? In just about every state, sleeping in the drivers seat of your car while you have a.08 BAC is a DUI. In some, sleeping in the back seat of your car with a.05 BAC is a DUI.

Bullshit like that dilutes the meaning of actual DUI's, and MADD fully supports it.

actually I read a while back that there were effectively holes in the laws of many states since they refer to the driver of the car.In some states if there is nobody in the car at all then the car could speed without breaking the traffic laws.

Now in this case

"Safety has been our first priority in this project. Our cars are never unmanned. We always have a trained safety driver behind the wheel who can take over as easily as one disengages cruise control."

If only urban areas would offer some sort of futuristic transit "system" whereby instead of burning 30 man-miles per gallon we were able to aggregate daily short and medium intra-city hops into "platoons" on single road vehicles or rail vehicles, that would leave the rider free to do work while a designated operator took care of the driving for them. Even BETTER is there was some sort of inter-city rail-type service that offered faster hops than any freeway without having to negotiate traffic.

The ability to read, or surf the web, or watch a movie/TV show durring my commute would be wonderful. Almost like getting a free hour everyday. 52 * 5 * 1 = 250 free hours a year.

Taking your comment a few steps further...

It's staggering how many hours of potentially productive time are wasted in traffic every day. Think of if this way: you hit a traffic jam heading to work in the morning. Even if it takes only 15 extra minutes of your time, you multiply that by the hundreds or thousands of people who are stuck like you, times some average hourly wage, and the potential worth of that time that was instead wasted is huge. The ability for a car to drive itself and for you to spend the

A widely-available car that even properly follows laws would also save, collectively, many hours per day of everybody's time, even among those who don't drive it.

A few seconds here because an intersection wasn't blocked... A few seconds there because a turn signal allowed some advance planning... Another few seconds because lane merges were done earlier than the last possible moment...

Here's [business20...cstudy.com] a delay-based definition of LOS. (There are other definitions for LOS, but I like delay best. It bears the most relevancy to drivers. There's a lot of work that goes into deciding the delay numbers, but that's a pretty good quick definition. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] has a good definition that goes beyond the HCM definition. I couldn't find any pretty pictures, but this pdf [sanjoseca.gov] shows approximately what we mean by the different levels of service.

The issue is that when you have a nonzero number breaking them, you want 40% breaking them. Too many, and it's chaos. Too few, and the few rule breakers cause larger disruptions. 40% has some asses and some who break the rules to essentially cover for the damage the asses would have done. No one should have done a study with 0%, because that doesn't exist in the US, and so couldn't be accurately studied, and if it was accurately studied, wouldn't have any applications. So doing that would be a waste of time and money.

If 0% were to break the rules, then it should flow better than any other number (assuming the rules are changed to take advantage of the possibilities in a 0% breaking scenario), but we can't determine that until we have some way to enforce the rules well enough find out for sure.

We don't have trains to speak of, outside maybe ten cities, and if we have a bus system it usually sucks and/or has very limited range which requires us to drive 1/2 of the way to our destination to reach the nearest stop.

I'd take the train if we had one, and I'd take the bus if it wouldn't double my commute time (at best) and still require several miles' worth of driving.

It is not an accident that there's not as much public transit as there could be in the US. When people continue to buy houses built in the middle of nowhere in great areas of sprawl, of course this problem will exist. You'd "take the train if we had one?" Who bought your house, or otherwise moved you where you live? There is plenty of vacant real estate in cities and in rationally planned streetcar suburbs, but people bitch that "it's too small" or "I can buy a mansion out in the middle of nowhere for the s

You're switching cause and effect. The US is spread out because of subsidies to a car-based economy, not the other way around. General Motors has killed public transport every chance they got, and now your country has lost the ability to use more efficient methods of transport.

Nah, imagine a street with a 40mph limit and a steady stream of robocars doing 39.99999mph. Just set up some roadworks and a temporary 20mph limit for 'safety'. $Ker-ching, $Ker-ching, $Ker-ching, $Ker-ching, $Ker-ching.

That is true for the cops. I am also sure that everybody would be happy if there would be a lot less traffic deaths cost by human error. However - here in the Netherlands - the income from traffic violations are a post on the yearly government budget and in your country it is the same. They make millions and millions of them. If that money would disappear they will find a way to let you pay their 'missing' income in another form. They need that money, because they already spending it.

Do you really belive that?? most states are shutting down the scale houses that inspect semi trucks in order to use the man power on drug task forces that make better headlines and profits now. The local governments are just playing catchup to the state governments.

This is BS. The Los Angeles city council admitted that they were installing stop light cameras to make up for budget short falls. When it it did not generate the expected revenue the failure was widely reported.

Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By mapping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes familiar with the environment and its characteristics in advance.

It's kinda lame that Google's solution to hard problems like how to get a computer to drive a car, is basically replaying a recording of how a human drove on that exact piece of road. So w

Any test begins by sending out a driver in a conventionally driven car to map the route and road conditions. By mapping features like lane markers and traffic signs, the software in the car becomes familiar with the environment and its characteristics in advance.

It's kinda lame that Google's solution to hard problems like how to get a computer to drive a car, is basically replaying a recording of how a human drove on that exact piece of road. So what if some things are changed, or the software gets thrown onto an unknown road? A human will still be able to cope, but this software?

Not a recording of how a human drove; rather, they sent someone to map the area (record lane sizes, lights, crosswalks, traffic hazards, stop signs, speed limits, etc.) for the software. The software still drove the car; it just used its knowledge of the static environment to assist it in making the decisions. It can focus more on reacting to reality (by mapping it as a deformed version of that static image) rather than trying to visually recognize and read speed limit signs etc.

Same thing humans do, watch out for them and react. Except, unlike humans, autonomous cars aren't so distractible and can react much more quickly. Also, if networked, the cars can be warned of hazards by another car well before actually encountering it.

The reason Google was collecting wireless data was for the simple necessity of controlling it's autonomous fleet of vehicles. Eventually, these drones will sweep the nation day and night using the plethora of open access points around the nation. Our own ineptness will be our downfall as the machines eventually become self aware. Sure, it was all for marketing and advertising to earn a few dollars, but I just can't live in a future they are creating. Yes, I am talking about autonomous sales droids that watch you day and night while analyzing your garbage. They will be on the front door to pitch you a customer tailored vacuum cleaner the moment you try to escape your home. It's a truely dark future that lies in the waiting.

They studied 6 drivers "with spotless records" behind the wheel. I would argue that they could gain valuable information by also studying poor drivers and teaching the program to a) avoid such behavior in it's own driving; and b) learn how to react to poor drivers out there on the road (e.g. passing on blind corners, turning without signaling, aggressive/NASCAR type diving into limited spaces, etc)

Will it pick up hitchhikers?
Will it courteously let people pull out who have been waiting?
Will it flick-off people who drive 30 under?
Will it flick-off people who drive 30 over?
Will it flicker brights to warn of speed traps?
Will it pull over for emergency vehicles?
Will it draft large semis?
Will it bring me hookers and blackjack?

-- Will it pick up hitchhikers?This is an option available in the comprehensive Android for Cars(TM) Options screen. It is set "Off" by default for passenger safety.

-- Will it courteously let people pull out who have been waiting?Using a variation on BitTorrent P2P technology, Android for Cars(TM) will auto-negotiate with other Car-OSs (including Windows 9 for Cars and Linux) priorities based on waiting time and resultant collective fuel efficiency to assign priorities.

-- Will it flick-off people who drive 30 under?

Android for Cars(TM) will predict the path and speed of all non-AI traffic based on it's currert course and the layout of terrain ahead. It will likely overtake and ignore most slower traffic, unless there is a risk in doing so.

-- Will it flick-off people who drive 30 over?

Android for Cars(TM) will predict the path and speed of all non-AI traffic based on it's currert course and the layout of terrain ahead. It will likely ignore and allow faster traffic to pass, unless there is compensation to be had. See "Legal Destruction of Road Traffic" in the Reference Manual.

-- Will it flicker brights to warn of speed traps?

Android for Cars(TM) complies with all National and State Laws regarding speeding and speed control. Google ourselves have a "Do No Evil" policy. For both these reasons, Android for Cars(TM) will ignore speed traps and law enforcement and meatbag's reactions to them.

-- Will it pull over for emergency vehicles?

Android for Cars(TM) incorporates two systems which will effectively provide for this situation. First, faster moving traffic is given priority anyway, and emergency vehicles running Android for Emergency Vehicles(TM) can signal direct commands to your vehicle.

-- Will it draft large semis?

Google failed to understand your question. Please retype or rephrase you enquire. Back to Google Android for Cars(TM) Home.

-- Will it bring me hookers and blackjack?

Google Android for Cars(TM) can and will run in completely automated mode, completing assigned journeys efficiently. However, identification of such subjective things as "Hookers" and "Blackjack" will require an independent Bending Unit, a supplementary control system, available seperately from Mom's Friendly Robot Company.

-- Also, who receives the citation in the event of a stop?

As legal "Owner" and "Operator" of the car, you do. This is why we provide full source...

The Streetnet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2017. Human decisions are removed from traffic management. Streetnet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the charging plug.

Companies that might otherwise be interested in bringing autonomous vehicles to the masses will be scared off by the huge monetary risks involved. Any autonomous vehicle involved in a deadly accident will result in a massive lawsuit against the manufacturer, even if the accident was someone else's fault, and even if the manufacturer admonishes the owner to monitor the vehicle's performance at all times while it's in operation. What's more, juries will distrust the "correctness" of autonomous vehicle controllers, to the point that manufacturers will lose lawsuits even when there's no real evidence that the vehicle was to blame.

I don't mean to be a Luddite, but if this works out, do you know what it will do to the economy? Tens of millions of jobs are based almost exclusively on driving. Truckers, cab drivers, even pizza delivery. A computer can work 24/7, so even if the system costs $100,000, that's still saves money over paying for employees.

I don't mean to be a Luddite, but if this works out, do you know what it will do to the economy? Tens of millions of jobs are based almost exclusively on driving.

It'll improve the economy by removing a large "tax" on everything that requires transportation (that is, almost everything) and freeing up the labor pool for more productive uses? By your argument we should be making self-service gas stations illegal as a job creation program. And maybe outlawing wireless meter reading systems -- those cost jobs too!

I don't mean to be a Luddite, but if this works out, do you know what it will do to the economy? Tens of millions of jobs are based almost exclusively on driving.

It'll improve the economy by removing a large "tax" on everything that requires transportation (that is, almost everything) and freeing up the labor pool for more productive uses? By your argument we should be making self-service gas stations illegal as a job creation program. And maybe outlawing wireless meter reading systems -- those cost jobs too!

You laugh, but I have never observed a self-serve gas station in New Jersey....

So what you're saying is that a lot of unemployed people won't have enough money to spend on less expensive goods. I'm sure they'll take comfort in knowing all the things they can't afford are cheaper than they used to be.

This is the problem with free market thinking. Yes, the GDP will improve. Prices will drop. Efficiency will go up. But even if all of our prices drop by 50% at the expense of 50% unemployment only a select few in the current economy can benefit from those reduced prices. Without income it doesn't matter what something costs--you can't afford it. On the brighter side you can cut the food stamps you're giving them since the grocery prices are reduced.

I don't really think we can be handcuffed for future technology because of people it might disrupt

Nobody stopped making cars because livery owners (people who rent out and care for horses) would lose their livelihood. Nobody stopped making electric lights because candle makers go out of business. Nobody stopped building computers because it would put all the accounting clerks out of business (people paid to add and subtract for businesses)

I doubt transportation that requires little human intervention will have as profound an effect as something that has revolutionized the way information is distributed. It's like saying automatic transmission had as profound an effect as the invention of the printing press (or radio, or television.) There is no comparison.

In London recently, there was a case where an automated train skipped something like 6 red signals and caused passenger trains to have to stop and wait until someone could get control back.

This is a train, that goes on rails and can't get into too much trouble. There are limited variables to deal with, and we can't get it right yet. I don't even want to think about doing this with cars in populated areas!